An introvert designer's survival guide to how to work with Sales
How to help Sales enough to avoid them throwing any curveballs at you
"You know how it is; over at my old company, we'd have to chain our doors shut to avoid Sales dropping in." My manager said as I nodded along.
While Designers need to collaborate with other departments, few departments seem more like polar opposites than Sales and UX. They're often pushy extroverts focused on closing deals in the present, while many of us are introverts who listen and Design for the future.
However, it's becoming increasingly clear that more than Design is needed in this economy. To remain competitive, it's essential to consider additional skills that can help make
We must consider adding additional skills to our skill stack to remain competitive.
While I'm a big fan of incorporating Data into our design processes, according to Darren Yeo, another approach is incorporating business thinking.
Doing so can allow us to support work alongside teams like Sales and make you a stronger job candidate in the eyes of the business. However, to do that, we first need to understand the Sales team's perspective and why UX and Sales run into conflict in the first place.
The present vs future: the core conflict between Sales and UX
Imagine an all-too-common scenario: A potential customer talks with a salesperson and says, "Hey, I like your product, but I need X feature built-in before I sign a contract."
The salesperson is happy and says, "Of course, we can add X feature if you sign on the dotted line." He then signs up a customer, the company makes more revenue, he gets rewarded with a fat Christmas bonus, and everyone's happy, right?
Wrong. Because by promising that thing, he's just thrown your Agile sprint planning into chaos. That feature, slated as a low priority by the Product team, suddenly becomes a top priority, and teams must scramble to re-arrange work priorities.
In addition, what customers ask for is often different from what they truly need. I once heard a customer request to update a Legacy enterprise system (i.e., 1970s/1980s Design) to a slightly less outdated version (i.e., 1990/2000s Design).
Lastly, this may eventually cause the organization to crumble. If you're chasing around whatever our present-day customers say, instead of doing user research to anticipate future needs, we may alienate future customers to appeal to our present ones.
However, that's not necessarily the Sales team's concern. Sales focus on generating revenue in the present. UX focuses on envisioning future users' needs and designs. There will always be some conflict between these two fields, but there's a trade-off.
While it may seem horrible from a UX perspective, having executives see that Sales can generate short-term profits (i.e., $1 million in revenue) and keep the lights on in exchange for this 'less than ideal' way of Designing things may be something that they choose to do anyways.
So, one of the best ways to mitigate this effect is to keep Sales informed and aligned with each other's goals.
How do you do that? Giving them small previews of work and some value while hiding stuff that isn't ready. In other words, treat them like an external stakeholder.
Treat Sales as an external stakeholder
One of the most important things I've learned in my design career is the importance of Internal and External stakeholders.
To summarize, Internal stakeholders are individuals or groups directly involved or impacted by a project or decision. These can range from your product team to Department heads, even to Executives if they have a stake in having the project succeed.
As a result, you are willing to share more of your work, talk about internal interests, and have them be directly involved with designing and building the products.
External stakeholders, on the other hand, are individuals or groups who are indirectly involved or impacted by decisions. While they're also important, they tend to have more indirect involvement with the product. These can include groups like end-users, business partners, local communities, and (in our case) Salespeople.
You want to keep works in progress and rough sketches private from these people, as they can significantly influence public perception, acceptance, and interest in the project. Instead, you want to provide more concrete offers, such as product tours or demos and small glimpses of well-polished products.
Doing this helps provide a general framework for what to show Sales (i.e., "Would I show this to the public?"). It also gives them the tools they need to do their job.
To do this, what can be helpful is to show them two important things:
What exists (i.e., what Engineering has built in a Production environment)
What is the Future product feature set at a particular date
The first one can be as easy as a product walkthrough of the account, showcasing all of the features that have been currently built for users to play with. This can also be a time to get feedback from an external audience, although this should be kept separate from other user testing.
The second thing is more of a Product talking point that provides a little wiggle room. If your Product Manager says we'll have these features by Q3 of 2024, then that's a standard answer that Sales can pass on rather than getting involved in when X feature will be live in Production.
However, the primary offering that Design can offer Sales comes from user research.
Pass along any relevant findings from pre- and post-user testing
Many pre- and post-user testing tasks touch on subjects the Sales team is interested in, including user motivations, product-market fit, product strategy, and more. So, learning to pass on these findings to the right people in the Sales teams, especially in short summaries, can be incredibly helpful.
For example, if I found out that most users tend to search for new products as contracts expire. Our users have had to do this search around the beginning of Quarter 2 (April 1st) in the past; passing that along to Sales can help them create a strategy around how to market and approach customers around the product.
These are some of the most important insights the rest of your team, including external stakeholders like Sales, need to know. It's essential to convey many things that often arise during these sessions. These include things like:
Some things that might be interesting to other people include things like:
Our competitors, the market, and new and upcoming products we might need to be aware of
How often would they typically want to engage with our products, including emails, social media, logging in, and more
The 'skill stack' or other tools they may use in conjunction with ours and how they typically work
New opportunities around Sales include particular features that the user may find valuable or able to work as a stand-alone product.
Etc.
Sharing this sort of research, in bite-size fashion, can not only help to answer some small questions that Sales or Marketing might have but can also show the value of User Research and how it's different than Market Research (one of the excuses that I've heard to avoid testing before).
Lastly, knowing what not to share with Sales is equally essential.
To avoid conflict, do not talk about future features with Sales
Part of the reason you want to show Sales the Future version of a product is to avoid the awkward conversation that often arises from discussing features.
Trying to talk about features, tasks, and other things around them is often counterproductive. Remember, the fundamental difference between Sales and UX is that one focuses on the present and the future.
If we still need to build a feature, discussing it prematurely may create hidden expectations about the timeline and effort needed to build a feature. For example, if we tell Sales about upcoming features, they may not know if they will happen in a year or the next two weeks.
As a result, any conversations they may have around a customer who wants one of those features may result in over-promising something that wouldn't have been around for the next six months.
Remember, the Sales job is to get people to sign contracts and generate revenue for the company. If they are working on information around things that aren't quite ready yet, but the expectation is they can get it done, they may over-promise the hopes that someone will sign a contract with us.
That's why you should only talk about future features and what's upcoming if you're sure it can be delivered in a timeframe that may keep potential customers happy.
After all, the last thing you want is for sales to throw curveballs into our already stretched-thin design process constantly.
Sales is a stakeholder you need to keep pleased
You may have never talked with your Sales team, especially in large organizations. However, having worked in startups and small companies for nearly half my career, I've sometimes worked alongside them.
More importantly, in this economy, I've heard Town Halls where CEOs say, "Do whatever it takes to support Sales." This is because Sales helps keep the lights on and brings you a paycheck.
In addition, in this uncertain age of AI and a weak design economy, understanding business thinking, especially how we can offer value to customers, can make you stand out as a job candidate.
With that in mind, extending an olive branch to Sales and working to keep them pleased (at a distance) may be something that you need to learn how to do to not only build a relationship with them but also help bring in revenue to avoid tough decisions like layoffs.
So, while you may not interact much with Sales (and you may not want to), knowing how to interact (and not be pressured) by them can be a critical skill to grow as a Designer.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. His free book, The Resilient UX Professional, provides real-world advice to get your first UX job and advance your UX career.